WIRED Readers’ Best Comments of the Week

A color-enhanced scanning electron micrograph of a water bear, which is probably the only creature on Earth that looks like a cannon wearing wrinkled khakis. Image: Eye of Science/Science Source

To quote a little movie called Jerry Maguire, you complete us, readers. We’re nothing without you. And you had a great week!

You were funny. And smart. You corrected us when we (read: I) had the audacity to tweet “Legos” instead of “Lego.” (Sorry!) You were also quite busy: you commented on Chris Goodfellow’s missing airplane theory a whopping 3,710 times, as of Friday evening.

Here are a few of your best comments. Obviously, they are cherry picked. You said too many interesting things to highlight every comment. Sure, there were some not-so-great comments, too, but we’re ignoring those, just like this public service Twitter account advised us to.

Coincidentally, I was just at the Mobile Medical Apps Roadshow yesterday which touched on this topic. The trouble with analyzing the data and trying to say something meaningful, predictive, or diagnostic is that the risk to the patient/consumer increases greatly and you bump into FDA regulated territory. This is an expensive and time consuming place to be with still somewhat murky guidelines and precidents. This is why 23 and me was shut down. Companies don’t want to stick their financial necks out too far, so they are just doing the numbers for now and leaving the interpretation to the patient. There will be some services like you describe and we all want, but it is going to take a little time, money, and bravery for it to happen.

IneffableMF is right to bring up a problem that will be ever-more pronounced as the trend toward personalized medicine continues, not just with health-tracking devices but also, increasingly, personal genomics.

Funny
Your humor shined on Facebook, especially in regard to the toughest creature on Earth, the tardigrades aka the water bear. We pointed out that “you can boil it, freeze it, irradiate it, and toss it into the vacuum of space – but it won’t die.” You had some follow-up questions:

We enjoyed the entire (short) comment thread on The Quirkiest QWERTY Keyboard Ever Is Made of Lego. We think the keyboard’s creator Jason Allemann should take reader Erik’s suggestion and build the next-gen out of the fearsome, unbreakable, unbeatable Kragle.